Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262488AbVEMS43 (ORCPT ); Fri, 13 May 2005 14:56:29 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262487AbVEMSys (ORCPT ); Fri, 13 May 2005 14:54:48 -0400 Received: from smtpout.mac.com ([17.250.248.88]:25325 "EHLO smtpout.mac.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262489AbVEMSwq (ORCPT ); Fri, 13 May 2005 14:52:46 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20050513182650.GJ23488@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> References: <1116001207.5239.38.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20050513171758.GB23621@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> <1116006828.5239.72.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20050513180915.GH23488@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> <1116008483.5239.79.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20050513182650.GJ23488@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v622) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, "Michael H. Warfield" From: Mark Rustad Subject: Re: Flash device types Date: Fri, 13 May 2005 13:52:37 -0500 To: lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen) X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.622) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1715 Lines: 42 On May 13, 2005, at 1:26 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > Not really. I believe sandisk has wear leveling on the 201 series CF > cards and on their new generation CF/SD for sure they have it (and > unfortunately for us they discontinued industrial temperature in the > new > line so we have had to look elsewhere for CF cards). > > Unfortunately a lot of what is sold to consumers at retail is cheap > crap. :) It does seem to be a problem finding out how things really work in these devices. There seem to be the following types (from worst to best): 1. No wear leveling. Bad blocks are mapped out at manuf. time and that is it. 2. Bad blocks are detected and remapped dynamically. This is sometimes called wear-leveling, but the device life is a function of how many spares there originally were. 3. "Real" wear leveling. This can move data to fully use the life of all sectors. 4. "Real" wear leveling with lots of optimization and write cache - these are large devices usually with the ability to have battery power to ensure write cache can be flushed out. #4 is easy to determine because of the size and complexity of the things. The others are much harder to distinguish and it really is important to know what you are dealing with. If you can't find out how it works, I would assume #1 or #2 which are both pretty poor. It really would be nice to easily find out what category of device these things really are. -- Mark Rustad, MRustad@mac.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/